Productivity Tools Make You LESS Productive (oh the irony…)
Let me start with a story…
When I first started out as an ‘entrepreneur’ (this word is garbage now thanks to drop shippers and the ‘instafamous’ btw), I thought I was working my ASS off.
I was working out of mom’s garage, and because I locked myself away for 80+ hours per week, I thought that meant I was doing 80+ hours of work, or, you know, let’s be conservative, and say it was 60.
So here I am, working 60 hours a week (lol), and yet I’m still dead broke. How broke? I could be working at McDonald’s making more kinda broke.
So then I decided to time track myself, you know, see where all of my time was going.
What happened next shocked me to the core… (#ClickbaitForLife)
It turns out I worked 84 hours in the week
…
Jokes… It was actually 24. I sucked (I like to think I no longer suck, but that’s my ego kicking in).
That’s 24 hours of ‘productive work’, where I was working on a specific outcome, rather than responding to messages with no real purpose.
How the F*&$ did that happen?
I’ll tell you how. Constant communication with my business partner, network, and anyone that would talk to me.
This came in the form of:
- Screwing around on Slack
- Facebook Messenger for those I didn’t have on Slack
- Mucking around with Trello
- Good ol’ Asana
SO I came up with a simple solution.
Ready for it…
A pen and paper. And if I wanted to talk to someone, I’d write down why. I’d meet with them once a day, and we’d each bring our agenda, and the conversation would have an objective.
Did it work? Yes.
How well? Kinda well, to start, but after a month — we were crushing it.
My theory about why it worked was this — we had an agenda, an objective; and the meeting had a start and finish time. That’s right, it wasn’t “I’ll call you at 4pm”. It was “We’re meeting from 4pm til 4:15pm, it cannot go over.”
We no longer had time for chit-chat (like happens in Slack)
Don’t even get me started on email
It’s f*#king shit, so stop emailing me.
Those long threads of emails suck, I get too much spam, and I’m sick of having to read 13 emails in a chain just to get the damn point.
If you email me, put the entire point you’re making in the subject line, and the evidence/extra info in the body. If you don’t do it like this, expect a delayed response (i.e. when I’m trying to hit Inbox Zero once a week)
QUICK HACK: https://unroll.me/ — bulk unsubscribes you from stuff. It’s cool. Apparently they have mad privacy leaks, but who cares, Google already knows all of my business anyway.
Enough on email, we all know it sucks. If you disagree, email me why, and watch me not bother to respond; feel that helplessness my friend.
Slack is my biggest time sink, still
I like Slack. I think it’s great to silo your communication into the business realm, rather than relying on other communication apps that can let family, friends, and idiots looking for free marketing advice to infiltrate my messaging experience.
But you know what sucks about Slack? It has no end-game. No objective. Yes you can make a project have its own channel, but it still leads to unnecessary conversation going in 20 different directions in that channel, and and all the other tempting channel bolding up in my left column.
And what happens after it’s done? You just archive the channel — and if you ever want to work out what happened with that project, good luck trawling through the old slack messages.
And look, my trusty “Pen and Paper” doesn’t solve the issue of recording the results, but hey, at least it doesn’t send me random shit at all hours that I “need” to view (even if I cbf responding, as most people I work with note happens quite regularly in Slack).
I’m sick of people contacting me.
And I’m a MASSIVE extrovert (apparently in the top 1% as far as extroversion goes), but I miss having time, and productivity.
To email me, I actually make people jump through small hoops before I’ll talk to them, I even made a site for it: www.ImHardToHire.com (seriously)
So what’s the solution?
I must admit, that website I made, is NOT the solution. That’s a violent reaction to too many inbound messages.
It doesn’t solve my biggest issue — internal messages (because, you know, you have to respond to employees at some point or they quit)
Here’s the landscape as I see it, for internal communication:
Slack: I time-tracked this, it takes up HALF of my day
Asana: Better, but too hard for the tech illiterate
Trello: Meh. It’s just a shitty version of Asana imo. Fight me about it, I’m right.
Email: Come on now.
WhatsApp: Even worse, I have family/friends intruding on my work time.
Facebook Workspace: Maybe promising, but I’m not sold on it just yet. It feels too much like Facebook; and that familiarity makes adoption easy, but I think it’ll lead to people using it like Facebook i.e. wasting time browsing shit all day long.
I think I might have found a solution (maybe, I think, soon?)
So I use this social platform called Gather— it’s just a better version of Facebook groups basically (I won’t get into that now)
Anyway, it turns out they’re bringing out a B2B version, for internal communication.
Look, I haven’t used it yet, but they’ve sold me on the concept (at least enough to join the waiting list and give it a try)
Here’s the theory in a nutshell:
Projects and their related communication need an objective, and a finish time.
I like that. Ultimately, it’s kinda what we think we do with Slack, if Slack lived up to the hype: We make a project channel, everyone puts in their thoughts for a week or so, it culminates in a Zoom call because it’s going in circles; and then we all try to remember the result of that Zoom call lol.
This appears to solve that, they say you’ll be able to go back and see the outcome very easily. UI looks good. I’m pretty sold on it at this pricepoint (WAY cheaper than Slack). They have a pretty crazy investor backing them too, so at least we know they’re not going to suck or he wouldn’t have thrown his money in.
Goddamn waiting lists
They haven’t released yet. But, it won’t be long (I guess. I’m just impatient)
Anyway, if you want to join the waiting list, just click here, and I suppose we’ll wait and see if this actually fixes the issue of productivity and how unstructured communication poisons it.
If it’s not as good as I’m hoping we can push them to make the changes we want- it’s too late for Slack, they are too big to care.
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